The Endless Concord, Chapter 8

VIII. Community Integration Pt. 1


Wonder Breads come in all shapes and sizes. The clients have each picked favorites over the years. Robert preferred the little black ones with the white spiral on the top. Justin liked the hockey puck with the green and white sprinkles. The wrappers from the blackberry pies littered Randall’s room and the outside of his door. It’s important for us to know these things. In the Plaza we would sometimes know who’s been where and when based on the Wonder Bread contraband littered around the hallways and blacktop. Willis had contrived special techniques with this practice. Often we would find him outside on the lawn with gloves and a plastic bucket inspecting the paraphernalia for signs of sporadic eating habits. He maintained the Wonder Breads tell him whether the client has been engaging in drug use based on whether the collected total of wrappers in a given week measure up to the weeks before it. One thing the clients don’t do is cut down their ration of Wonder Breads. Everything else goes to hell with the social security money they are granted every week but the Wonder Breads remain the apex of what currency will allow them. The only other bounty transcending the breads would be drugs, of course.
I thought I’d take Randall and Marvin over there before we head out to the street. It’s true, there was no skywalk, but we managed. I perused the isles while Randall and Marvin bickered over the new product. It had a Latino clown on the front of it with the words, “¿Es este chocolate?” printed in the middle. On the back were the words, “¡Sí, es chocolate!”
“It’s for Spanish speaking patrons only!” Marvin whined, making to pull the object out of Randall’s hands.
“It’s none of your business what I eat!” Randall yelled, elbowing Marvin in the arms and pulling away.
Marvin let out a yelp and fell to the floor. There was a loud thump and the neighboring Wonder Breads on the racks were sent tumbling down onto Marvin’s haunch. “You see what he does? This is abusive treatment…and I have mind to alert the authorities! They’ll arrest him because he doesn’t even speak Spanish!” Marvin rolled around on the floor like a turtle that lie on its shell struggling to right itself.
I helped Marvin to his feet and watched Randall devour the Wonder Bread right there in the store getting crumbs on his face and leaving them there.
The woman at the cash register looked on with indifference.
Randall paid in pennies and we walked out to the street to get the day started. I checked my knapsack to insure I had all the proper documentation in case something horrible were to happen. I made sure my name-tag was properly in place and Marvin made sure his yellow turtleneck sweater only covered half of his paunch and we set off.
There were banners all over the street calling attention to neighborhood awareness, crime watch, equal rights, union memberships, and Coca Cola. To call it a street parade wouldn’t be doing it any justice; it was an epic event happening all over the county on a number of landmark streets such as this one.
“Live it up boys!” I shouted to Marvin and Randall over the sound of marching bands and hip hop with a big smile, excited to be out of the office and away from florescent lights altogether.
Marvin had a bright smile that looked as if it were lifting his whole body into the crisp blue afternoon sky. Randall’s head was vibrating rapidly and his cheeks were puffed up, like at any moment he was going to vomit. He held his large stomach in his hands and trailed slowly behind us. He was in an excellent mood. His dosages are so highly irregular that what would normally seem like cause for concern really meant just the opposite.
I saw Willis on the other side of the street waving at us. I waved back. He turned around negotiating the price of a burrito and disappeared into a flock of fire dancers.
The first attraction was put on by a local art student and consisted of a cardboard box in the shape of an ATM machine. The box had plastic dials and gadgets on it and a little slot at the bottom where transactions were made. People were standing around it mildly amused. Marvin approached with a dollar.
“Choose your option!” sounded a pseudo robotic voice from the machine.
A little hand wrapped in a silver glove came out with a sign listing the options. Marvin pushed the 1 on the box shaded with a black marker. Nothing happened.
“Choose your option!” The voice said again. Marvin pushed the 1 again and waited in anticipation.
“Just tell me your option!” the voice now said, sounding annoyed.
“Option 1!” Marvin shouted into a dotted hole at the top right hand corner.
There was a short pause where we heard paper wrestling.
“Option 1: prediction of your future. Your future will be…” The voice came out sounding crackled and distorted like the repeat of an order at a broken drive-through box at a fast food venue.
I laughed and clapped stupidly, breathing in the air and general endless possibilities that appear when one realizes they don’t have to see an office for the rest of the day.
“Option 1!” Marvin said again with a big smile, waiting in anticipation.
“Marv, it’s a joke, that’s the whole idea,” I hollered, patting him on the back in good humor.
“Thank you for your business, please come again!” the robotic voice announced.
“Option 1!” Marvin said, doing his tip toe in place dance he does when he’s especially excited.
Nothing happened.
Marvin shook the box. The sound of a man being rattled around inside sounded especially violent. “It’s not working!” he said plaintively.
Randall stood near us starring up at the sun.
“Get lost man,” the voice said from inside, this time sounding less robotic.
“Marvin, it’s a joke, it’s supposed to sound distorted; no one can really predict your future,” I said, gathering up Marvin by the arms and making a move to leave.
A small audience developed around us. Marvin wouldn’t budge.
“It ate my dollar!” Marvin said, shaking the box again more violently.
“Oh my God!” the voice cried from inside.
“It’s okay! I’m his care provider!” I said, showing my badge to the crowd of ten or twelve people who were now readying themselves for some kind of episode.
“Here’s your dollar man, just get out of here,” the man in the box said in a whisper, producing a gloveless hand from the slot holding a dollar.
“AHHH!” Marvin hollered at the sight of the non-mechanical hand, rousing Randall’s attention who, also seeing the hand, tore the top of the box open revealing a college student sitting on a stool inside. Change and money were littered all over the insides of the box.
“Jesus, we need to go,” I said, making a move to pull the both of them away from the scene.
“There’s a man in there!” Randall murmured in a deep voice, hair vibrating with adrenaline.
“It’s a scam job! A scam job!” Marvin cried flamboyantly, huffing his arms in the air and tapping his feet in place. At which point the student stood up, hitting his head on the top flap of the box and stumbling into another booth causing the whole thing to fall over.
“AHHH!” Marvin yelled again.
People clamored to help the man up as I managed to drag Marvin away from the scene, having to double back for Randall who was picking up the money on the grass.
“They’re stealing!” a woman cried after us as we ambled through the crowd.
“Following protocol! Protocol!” I shouted senselessly, pushing the two of them through and making our way to the other side of the street.
We ducked into a coffee shop and I sat the two of them down while I ordered a coffee and Randall counted the money he made on the table, fairly giving Marvin the dollar he had lost, making the situation seem oddly accounted for.
“Okay, so…can any one of you tell me why all of that was necessary?” I asked quickly, returning with a cup of coffee.
“It was a scam job, there was a man inside,” Marvin said resolutely.
Randall counted eleven dollars and thirty-six cents.
“It was meant to be like that, it was a comedy routine Marvin. If the two of you can’t control yourselves this year I have no choice but to take you back home. I’m already in a bed of coals right now and if you two make it even more difficult for me we’re going back,” I said, more to myself, looking out of the window to see if there were any police around.
“Are we going to fill out incident reports?” Marvin asked excitedly.
I looked at the I.R.’s resting inside my knapsack: lengthy forms requiring several signatures, a round-table discussion and endless trips to the copy machines where they’d finally rest in the case file after an hour of file entry forms. The wall of papers stared
back at me with a knowing threat of drowsiness and tedium.
“No, we won’t be signing any I.R.’s…as a favor to the both of you…I’ll wave it…provided you can behave, you know?”
“But I don’t mind I.R.’s. It’s the proper procedure,” Marvin said cheerfully.
“Hey Marvin, why don’t you buy yourself a cup of coffee with that dollar there?”
“But Willis won’t let me have any more coffee! He says it isn’t helping with my sleeping patterns and has a negative affect on my behavior!”
“Don’t you like coffee?” 
 “Oh yes!”
“Well, maybe Willis is right, you know you shouldn’t drink coffee…” I said, putting my hands in my pockets and waiting for what comes next.
“I know a lot about coffee. Did you know there are hundreds of different ways to roast coffee? And each roast depends on the variety of each coffee, respectively. Vietnamese coffee is one of the stronger ones and is served super-condensed in shot glasses allowing the patron to dilute the substance according to his or her liking. Arabic coffee is generally a darker roast…but of course camels are often used for transportation purposes. Camels can hold several gallons of water inside, and they are cousins to the Alpaca, which is a great resource for sweaters!”
I ushered the both of them out of the coffee shop while Marvin continued his monologue and we made our way down the street.
It was a bright Monday afternoon and people seemed especially excited to be outdoors. Children with paper banners sang through the streets with parents trailing behind them occasionally yelling, “I see honey! Very good!” Men with suspenders lined up on the sidewalk displaying their mustaches to an audience of semi-amused white people holding astonished looking children. Measuring sticks were brought out and winners were assigned. People with painted faces handed out flyers and plastic buttons with the words, “Mastermind Congress! Masterson in 08” scrawled disproportionately across the length of the objects.
Marvin approached one of the Masterson people and obtained a button. He polished it with his sleeve and fastened it to the neck of his sweater triumphantly.
The high-strung man with the blue face shouted into the ear of Marvin, who was hysterical with solidarity. “Are you for the abolition of statistical analysis of marijuana related birth defects in ring-tailed gibbons? That research is paid for with tax dollars! Tax dollars!”
“Yes! Yes!” Marvin hollered, still shuffling through the crowd with Randall and I.
“Masterson in 08! I’ll see you at the voting box! We’re the same you and I! The same!” the man shouted behind us, throwing his buttons in the air.
I spotted Chelsea, one of the quieter clients up stairs at the plaza, up ahead and decided it would be a good idea to see if we can’t meet up with the others just in case anything else went terribly wrong. They were eating at one of the side stalls and we stopped to join them. Randall hunkered down on one of the stools while I showed Marvin to the stool nearest him so I could keep an eye on the both of them. Tonya purchased a hotdog for herself and was talking church with the owner of the stall. Apparently all proceeds went to refurbishing the Church of Perpetual Gospel over on Plank Street. Each hotdog was wrapped in a flyer announcing, “This hotdog can sustain you for an hour or so, depending on your level of intake, gastro control, metabolism, etc., but the word of God can sustain you for eternity.”
“I’ll have a hotdog,” I said, noticeably amused. I turned to Marvin and Randall, “Do you guys want anything?”
“Eternal life,” Marvin said thoughtfully, reading one of the crumpled, ketchup soaked flyers on the countertop.
“They’re just serving the hotdogs now.”
“Wait a minute now,” the elderly woman behind the counter said cheerfully, “are you interested in hearing the word my brother?”
I looked over at Tonya, who shrugged her shoulders, and back at Marvin.
“Oh yes! What can I do to help?” Marvin said excitedly.
“Well aside from the food, we are asking for just a small donation to help our little community build a new church suitable for the word of the Lord. Now that’s the word! Aint no other word but the Lord’s word!”
“Oh that sounds wonderful!” Marvin exclaimed, pulling out his social security money; about 200 dollars in five dollar bills crumpled up into a thick ball.
The woman looked on with astonishment. “My word, why you looking to bring the house down with all that!” she said laughing.
The man helping her behind the counter reached over and handed me my hotdog and asked me if I wanted anything else. I gave him a dollar while still looking over at Tonya for some hint of whether she thought this might turn out to be a disaster or not.
“My word! Blessed be! The Lord will surely…” the woman began, attempting to grapple the money and interrupting herself with numbers and figures.
Marvin suddenly had this spiritual glow about him.
“Ma’am? Uh…Ma’am?” I put in, completely taken aback, trying to get the attention of the woman who now busied herself counting the bills and pushing them into the donation box. “That’s his social security money and, well, I’m not a Doctor or anything, but he’s been declared medically unsound…” I began, the last part in a whisper, “I’m personally willing to make a donation myself…but uh…he’s not in any shape or form mentally fit to just…I don’t know…donate large balls of cash to random churches. I know it was a wonderful gesture…”
The words weren’t getting through at all.
“A little help Tonya?” I asked crassly, holding my hands out in the air.
“Uh uh, you aint getting me involved. You know not to be taking Marvin around with all that cash on him…just asking for trouble,” she said in between bites of hotdog.
“I didn’t know he had all of his SSI on him, and I certainly didn’t know this was some kind of holdup operation. What is this anyway? Do you know this woman?” I asked, pointing over at the kindly old woman who, at this juncture, finally stopped counting.
“She’s a sister at the house of the Lord! Now why you want to go on discouraging this kind servant of God from making a donation? What? You don’t think the money’s going to the church? You think it’s going in somebody’s pocket?!” The woman said loudly, rocking her head from side to side with a hand on her hip, the other hand clutching the ball of money in an odd show of contrast.
“I don’t know if it’s ethical to take money from an insane person…that’s really all I’m saying,” I said, holding my hands up in the air apparently to show I didn’t have any weapons, and taking a step back.
Marvin beamed and radiated. Randall licked the ketchup off of the God messages. Smiling patrons swarmed in droves throughout the street carrying plastic trinkets and wearing oversized hats.
She quoted the verse in the bible of the insane man on the beach after the fishing trip where Jesus chased all the demons out of him and told me no man is insane in God’s eyes.
Another audience spawned and Tonya finished eating and worked crowd control announcing, “We’re from the Plaza down the street!” while the people slowly dispersed.
“Listen, once the money goes into the box, I can’t take it out,” the woman said after some bargaining.
“What if I took it out? Would that be okay?” I asked, knowing I’m probably digging a deeper hole.
“What kind of remark is that? You know what I think? I think this don’t have nothing to do with him being crazy as you say,” she said waving her hands in the air during the ‘crazy’ part and bulging her eyes out, “I don’t think you like the fact that a white man is donating money to a black church!”
“Christ!” I said dejectedly, throwing my hands up.
Tonya eventually came forward feeling, to her own personal amusement, that I received enough torture and stepped in. With her help we were able to get most of the money back with a warning that we shouldn’t come back and eat the hotdogs anymore. I gathered the elated Marvin and Randall up and began making our way down the street in embarrassment.
“Why was all of that necessary?” I asked Tonya as we walked away with Chelsea bobbing in front of her. Tonya laughed and patted me on the back and we shuffled on to the next attraction feeling the day would never end.